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Joe Petyan

#MY STORY

Executive Partner, JWT

Joe Petyan, Executive Partner at J. Walter Thompson, talks about his beginnings as a trainee graduate in the Marketing and PR industry and how he rose to his position at JWT Agency.

Joe talks about what he thinks it takes to be a successful leader, leaders he admires, and what is important for future leaders.

He goes on to discuss his guiding principles and mantras in business.

He then goes on to talk about the importance of relationships in business, the successful projects he has enjoyed as well as what mistakes to avoid in the industry.

Joe discusses how he has built his successful team in his agency, why diversity is important and should be celebrated. He also shares recruitment strategies and what the Agency looks for when recruiting for senior roles.

He then describes the fundamentals of business planning by his Management team at the Agency.

Joe talks about managing and balancing creativity and creative people with client requirements and client expectations, about the creative and business strategies at his Agency, how to go about winning new clients and new business, and his approach and views on winning awards.

Joe sees a bright future for the creative industries in the UK as long as human creativity is harnessed and celebrated.

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Joe Petyan

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YOUR STORY
SUMMARY: Joe Petyan, Executive Partner at J. Walter Thompson, talks about his beginnings as a trainee graduate in the Marketing and PR industry and how he rose to his position at JWT Agency.
My name is Joe Petyan, and I’m Executive Partner here at J. Walter Thompson London. J. Walter Thompson is one of the largest and longest standing agency networks in the world.

Well I think I laughingly say that I have a singular lack of creativity in my career choices because I’ve only ever worked at one place and it’s here at J. Walter Thompson. Really it started I did some work experience in marketing and in PR, and I knew I wanted to get into this sort of arena, but I quickly learnt was that PR was a lot of hot air at the time. Things have changed. I wanted to get into something with a tangible product, a tangible output and for me the creative advertising business was perfect.

I’d done a bit of acting actually, which was a perfect qualification. I’d been in the National Youth Music Theatre and I’d been in films and things, and I quickly found that a bit of acting capability was quite useful when it came to dealing with the various tasks that we have in an agency environment. I joined as a graduate trainee. As my peers started moving to get pay rises and moving to get different challenges, what I found, I was very lucky, I found that that every time I sort of put my head above the parapet to look and find other opportunities, other opportunities came to me within J. Walter Thompson. I count myself as very lucky that I’ve constantly been stimulated and excited enough to stay and take on new challenges.

LEADERSHIP
SUMMARY: Joe Petyan, Executive Partner at J. Walter Thompson, talks about what he thinks it takes to be a successful leader, leaders who he admires, and what is important for future leaders.
For me successful leaders will have different opinions on what the key ingredients are, but for me there are two very clear ones that stand out. The first is people who care. It’s all very well being in charge or having a big title, or being a leader or thinking you’re a leader, but if you don’t care it’s all for nought. It’s certainly very obvious and certainly for me in my career and when I’ve worked with other leaders. The people who care and the people who don’t care, it becomes a very big distinguisher of talent and of how predisposed people are going to be to follow that leadership. If you demonstrate credibly that you care, people will follow more. I think that’s the first thing. The second thing in leadership is about what drives you. For me I tell every new recruit in our agency, that for me I’ve built my career on trying to understand what motivates people, understand motivations. If you’re going to understand the motivations of your clients, the real motivations of your colleagues, or the real motivations of the creative people you’re working with, you can so much better legislate for them and provide for them and then lead through to successful results. So for me those are the two things, it’s about caring and it’s about understanding motivations in people.

I don’t normally work in twos, but for me inspirational leaders, there are two that really stand out. One is Ernest Shackleton. I just think that the story of Shackleton and how he sort of led people through the most appalling adversity, and in creative business you encounter adversity. You get people who don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve, people who don’t buy into your creative agenda. People who haven’t seen things like the things you’re trying to create, and therefore it’s so much harder to buy. Shackleton demonstrated all the skills I think in just the most appalling adversity, in what he and his crew experienced. He was able to lead from the front and keep them motivated, understand what made them tick, what motivated them, and he cared for his people and led through. I think, in historical context, he was fantastic. In a more contemporary context I was always very taken by Sir Stuart Rose of Marks and Spencer at the time. I can remember seeing him speaking at an event or at a dinner, and he was asked-, and it was the onset of a very deep recession, and someone asked him from the audience “What are you going to do at Marks and Spencer’s?” He grasped the lectern and said “We’re going to cope”, and the whole audience went quiet. They thought there was going to be some sound bite or some clever strategy but it was very human. It was very personal and it was very real. “We’re going to cope”, and that’s what we’re going to do. I think that’s the kind of leadership you want to see. Honest, disarming and real human approaches to challenges.

Understanding what will be the makeup of our future leaders is a very interesting area, because we used to debate these sort of thing when I first joined the agency. Of course nobody had a mobile telephone then. Things have moved on so quickly and so fast. I think it’s very very difficult to predict what future leaders of the creative industry will be like. I think they will have to move infinitely faster, and I think people will have to be much more experimental in their styles and what they do, because technology moves so quickly and customer tastes and consumer attitudes change so quickly and so readily. I think that will just get faster and faster and faster, so people will need to be much more agile in their leadership and being considered. Who knows? Those 100 day plans, everyone talks about having a 100 day plan when they start in leadership. Well maybe it’s going to be a 30 day plan. Maybe you have to give in your 7 days in plan. Maybe it’s my 1 day in plan. Thing are moving so fast now, and legislating for that and being as reactive without being knee-jerk I think will define our future leaders particularly.

PASSIONS
SUMMARY: Joe Petyan, Executive Partner at J. Walter Thompson, discusses his guiding principles and mantras in business.
For me the guiding principles are quite clear. On one level you have to lead by example, everyone will say that. I can remember my dad runs board [ph 6:06] and paper processing plants, and I can remember as a child going in, really dark and satanic mills, they’re nasty, dirty dangerous places to work. I can remember him doing a Tony Blair. Rolling up his sleeves, taking off his tie, helping on the machinery to help people make things happen. I think that kind of hands on leadership is absolutely paramount. Sitting in an ivory tower and expecting people, minions, to do things, it just doesn’t wash. It’s not the way to operate. I think that’s one critical area. I think the second in our business is that creative agendas can feel selfish. I think clients particularly, in our industry, can be very wary of that. If the agency or the individual’s own creative agenda appears to overpower the business agenda from the commissioning client’s point of view, that is a very dangerous place to be. There’s a balance I think. Obviously our product is creativity so it’s paramount to us and our businesses if we’re to survive. We have to be creative. If the art in our creativity is our primary motivation rather than our art solving client problems then you’ve got a bit of a problem on your hands.

My personal mantra is boringly consistent. It is about understanding human motivations. The most crystal clear example I think is when you find young people in our business find themselves banging their heads against a brick wall. They can’t understand why they’re not getting through. They can’t understand why the client doesn’t respect the integrity of an idea. Quite often it can be as simple as a holiday that’s been booked, and the client doesn’t want to have a meeting in that period because they know they’re going on holiday. Or the client is bonused on something that is the completely opposite end of the spectrum within which we’re trying to operate. Understanding what the motivations are of those people is so so important, because ultimately if you understand them, you can produce better creative products. You can produce better ideas, more compelling ideas, because you can legislate for the motivations for the people you’re selling to or speaking with or partnering with.

SUCCESSES & MISTAKES

SUMMARY: Joe Petyan, Executive Partner at J. Walter Thompson, talks about the importance of relationships in business, the successful projects he has enjoyed as well as what mistakes to avoid in the industry.

I’m particularly proud of longevity of relationship. It’s totally unsexy. When people talk about long term relationships, or being in business for a long time or working on a particular account for a long time, it just sounds inherently boring. I think actually, I’ve enjoyed a lot of success. I’ve been very lucky by being loyal, not only to the company I work for but also to the clients I work with. There’s this sense that cycle in and out of businesses is a good thing for one’s career, to move on, to do something else. The beauty of our creative industries is that we’re working with so many different sectors all the time, there’s infinite variety. So I took the view, with all this infinite variety, you don’t actually have to hop in and out of positions, and in and out of different engagements in order to be motivated. That stood me in good stead, because as everybody else around me was hopping around me, they were all hopping and the clients were all leaving and people were progressing their careers and getting pay rises by moving on. As a constant you generate more understanding, more equity in the things you’re doing. So unsexy yes. Did it help? Most definitely. A bit of loyalty and a bit of longevity can be underestimated I think.

I think also another key success for me really was working on the HSBC Business. I can’t put it any other way. To be able to innovate in media formats, to create airport jet bridge advertising as a medium, to be able to create a brand that is touching people the world over in a consistent way by working with creative people the world over, in one of the most boring [?10:09] categories there is, finance. It was an enormous boost for me and how I felt about business. It’s very very important.

There have been many many clangers. There was one particular clanger with a brand I can’t really talk about, but I’d arranged for some angels to be in a live, very public setting, and it was the public setting that day of publicised TV broadcast memorial service for multiple deaths. I’d arranged for these angels to arrive and be there, meanwhile there was this broadcast funeral event taking place with my angels and my brand over there. It was an absolute disaster. I don’t want to do that ever again. Doing your homework before you hold an activation event is very very important. I think actually some of my biggest regrets or some of my biggest mistakes have been when I’ve allowed the wrong agenda to go first. I think if you allow the wrong agenda to go first there are all sorts of-, but it’s understanding what should be your primary agenda focus when you’re delivering a creative project. If a particular agenda gets in the way that can be very damaging. It can be internal and external. Internally maybe an awards driven agenda can become too prevalent. It can become damaging. It can become difficult to what you’re trying to achieve. Equally maintaining relationship satisfaction with the people you’re working with can often be a barrier to creativity. You have to compromise. You have to work out what your lead agenda item is going to be. I regret sometimes having put maybe a client relationship before something else. Or maybe not being more robust about safeguarding a client agenda at the expense of an award show or something. It’s prioritising those agenda items and being resilient in the face of criticism or disagreement. That’s what I regret.

PEOPLE
SUMMARY: Joe Petyan, Executive Partner at J. Walter Thompson, discusses how he has built his successful team in his agency, why diversity is important and should be celebrated. He also shares recruitment strategies and what the Agency looks for when recruiting for senior roles.

discusses the important of attracting and retaining the best talent for the job, and the vital role that he plays in this recruitment process. He talks about the effectiveness of having good staff benefits in place. He discusses the value of having a work placement programme scheme at the agency in attracting and retaining fresh young talent, as well as advice for recruiting for senior roles.
Well building a team in an agency is of paramount importance obviously. It’s not a cliché, people are everything. In an agency they are the creative product. They are what we do. So what we look for is a variety of different things. We look for a variety of different skillsets. We look for diversity. What’s quite interesting is when people say “Is there a type?” There’s never a type. From the moment you’ve got a type you’ve got a problem on your hands, because that will stifle the variation and the creativity, and all the good stuff we need in our business. So looking for variation, looking for diversity, looking for different skills, different outlooks. I can remember when I joined this place I had a particular degree. My degree was in Russian and French. It was lovely that there were other people that had degrees in Architecture and degrees in Greek, and degrees in Philosophy. You didn’t have a homogenised bunch of people with the same Marketing Degree. You had lots of different people with lots of different backgrounds, and lots of different degrees and educations. It’s a very stimulating thing, so we look for that diversity.

I think the other thing we really look for are people who can think for themselves. People who want to think for themselves, and don’t want to be spoon fed, don’t want to necessarily have read the right thing or spin out what is expected. Having something unexpected in a sea of sameness is wonderfully exciting. That’s what we try and do with brands. That’s why we use the word differentiate so often in marketing. Differentiating through our people helps us differentiate in our creativity. That’s very very very important.

Other things we look for is, it’s a very human and basic skill, which is being personable. Wanting to spend time with people. We all spend far too long working, and not playing. What happens is you’ll actually end up playing when you’re at work. You have extended days and so on and so forth. The commitment we ask of our people is high, therefore we want our people to be people who get on with each other. So we’ve got a thing we refer to as the train test. Quite often when we interview people or speak to people or start conversations with people about working with them, we often ask ourselves would they pass the train test. The train test’s quite simple. Imagine you’re on a train for two hours, would you be able to do that journey there and back once a week? One of our clients is in York. Would I be able to go with somebody, every week, up to York and back on the train? Do I like them enough? Can I chat with them enough? Do I want to be with them enough? That’s a pretty good selection criteria.

When recruiting more senior people, obviously they have to have the right skills for the task. We try desperately not to recruit people for particular tasks. I think it’s quite an important point. We try to recruit for the agency. So it puts a different lens on the candidate. You could have the most impeccably qualified candidate, but you might not want to spend any time with them. We’re recruiting for the agency at large. People who have diverse skills, as we’ve said, but also perhaps people who can perhaps turn their hand to other things. People who are quite versatile, people who will think freshly in the market. The more senior you get actually, the less I wonder, you’re looking for particular skillsets. You’re looking for more diversity and more range and depth and breadth in their capabilities, rather than this person’s particularly good at x, or this person’s particularly good at y. When that remit comes to an end or circumstances change what happens to that person’s career? What happens to their development? Hiring in a lot of square pegs is a bad idea I think in a creative business like ours.

PLANNING
SUMMARY: Joe Petyan, Executive Partner at J. Walter Thompson, discusses the fundamentals of business planning by his Management team at the Agency.
Business planning is a fundamental part of our business. I think I’ve always been staggered as I’ve grown up through the industry how naive an industry it is around business. In many ways it’s frowned upon to be business like. It’s almost the enemy of creativity. You can understand that, it makes sense. Of course you have to pay people their pay check at the end of the month, and if you’re going to pay 400 people, or however many people your business employs, you need to be robust and you need to have business plans, and you need to have strategies for the future. Like any business outside of the creative industry we try and adopt as robust a business planning process as possible. We have quarterly reporting with our global head office, and they in turn have quarterly reporting to the parent company. You set yourself and your targets, and your stretch targets and your budgets, and you work through the course of the year to achieve those goals. If you haven’t got goals then what are you going to do? You’re not going to stay in business very long I wouldn’t think because chaos would reign. So a robust and adult business underpinning to a youthful creative dynamic business is definitely the way to go. Otherwise we’d all be running around with our hair on fire.

The fundamentals for us here are that we have a three year business plan that we have agreed with our global management. We set out that three year plan. There are four key pillars to that plan. We have an annual budget that is set within each of the three years in that plan. You’re working towards goals, and it’s constantly refreshed, constantly renewed and on a quarterly basis. We’ll revaluate, we renew, and we’ll go again, and it’s deliberately designed to grow. If you aren’t growing there’s no point in being in business.

Our management team here has learnt how widely to consult in business strategy I think over the past few years. Our management team was previously quite closed about our business strategy, so we would develop it in camera [ph 18:31] almost, and then adhere and work with it with our management team, and our global management team. I think what we’ve learnt is to be more collaborative around the inputs and the outputs is a good thing, because the people coming into work each and every day want to know what they’re striving for, what the end goals are, why they’re doing what they’re doing. To take their guidance and input on what’s important about how we structure our agency and how we deliver our product, and how to better deliver our product. That’s been fantastically important in building our latest three year plan. Then reporting back is what we’re now trying to do. These were the inputs that came from the staff, from our people, and these are the outputs that we’ve achieved or that we are achieving or seeking to achieve. Keeping that going on a rolling basis is, I think, very valuable. It keeps people motivated and it’s adult to adult, it’s not adult to child. It’s a better way of operating.

CREATIVITY
SUMMARY: Joe Petyan, Executive Partner at J. Walter Thompson, talks about managing and balancing creativity and creative people with client requirements and client expectations.
Ensuring the creative output meets the client requirement is a difficult subject, because sometimes the right creative solution might not be quite what the client requirements are. I think that when an agency has integrity, has enough confidence, it’s an interesting line that you need to draw and that you need to be aware of. Taking wonderful creativity and taking great thoughts and persuading people of their merits, even if they don’t adhere to the expectation or the ask, is as important I think as being on brief. Or listening or delivering against a particular task. It is a balancing act. I think it’s about being as adult and collaborative as you can. The best creative people understand what the business challenges are, and the very best business people understand why creativity can be frightening, and can be a bit off-brief or a bit worrying. With the end goal you’re solving a business problem. There is a balance and there is a degree of partnership that you need to build first in order to get to the right creative solution.

I think when managing creative people, it sounds almost like a paradox managing creative people, everyone talks about organised chaos, it’s the old cliché. I think people have to feel like they have a common agenda, they’re working together to the same goals. If you’re managing a creative person or a creative process, and that doesn’t feel like you’re constant and it doesn’t feel like you’re in step, it doesn’t feel like you’re going in the same direction, the wheels are going to fall off very very quickly, so the creative people need to feel that the people they are working with are with them. The people that are working with the creative people need to feel those creative minds are with them and the business. It’s only when you’ve got those things going together. The creative thinking might be ludicrous or the idea might be so avant-garde it scares the living daylights out of everybody, but as long as you have the sense that you’re working together and you’re going in the same direction, that’s the best way to manage the process. The moment it feels like the agenda’s diverged, then you’ve got problems on your hands.

COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT
SUMMARY: Joe Petyan, Executive Partner at J. Walter Thompson, talks about the creative and business strategies at his Agency, how to go about winning new clients and new business, and his approach and views on winning awards.
Winning new clients and winning new business is fundamental. It’s the lifeblood of any agency. It’s so so important. We’ve been relatively successful for a variety of reasons. I think that going the extra mile is always important in any new business endeavour. Just delivering against the brief is fine, but doing that and more is always a good rule or starter for ten. I think that showing intelligence, I know it sounds a bit pompous, but being intelligent about your answer, being intelligent around the business issues rather than solely focusing on one particular thing or on creativity, you have to be creative in your strategic thinking as well as in your creative solution. The two aren’t separate and unconnected, so I think going the extra mile and being intelligent in your thinking is absolutely critical. That intelligence extends so far up the process, because without properly interrogating the business and the problem, the audience and the market factors and everything else you can’t hope to come up with a decent and effective business solution. Those are two very very very important things. I think the other thing is building a team. When you’re working on a piece of new business the first thing a client can smell is a fragmented or disparate team. You might front the very best people you’ve got from different disciplines and take them into a meeting with a new business prospect. If they aren’t cohesive as a group of people nobody’s going to buy into them. You might have five spectacular business leading geniuses together in a room, but unless they’re a team and overtly working together as a team then you’ve lost before you’ve started the meeting.

It’s interesting around the subject of awards, because I think you’ve got two different schools of thought. You’ve got awards at all costs, go get awards and gain your credentials. It’s the medal, it’s the badge of honour, it’s the evidence of creativity. The other is do the right job, provide the right solution and the awards will come. I’ve worked with all sorts of people in my career in both camps. It’s an interesting perennial debate, and I think it’s dangerous. I do think it’s dangerous if awards is the motivation for going into an arrangement or business partnership or relationship, because it takes you down a track. We all know that work can win awards without actually necessarily delivering against the task which they were originally intended for. Again there’s this theme of being adult in quite a childlike industry. I think where being adult about it is is when the business imperative is at the heart of what you do, and then the creative outcome is such that not only does it solve the business imperative, but it also wins the awards because by definition you have been creative in order to solve the problem. That’s where the Holy Grail is. That’s why things like the Cannes Effectiveness Awards are really important because you can only enter the Effectiveness Awards if you’ve previously won a creative award. It dramatizes the importance of both creativity and business effectiveness, because that’s why we’re all here. That’s what our business is.

THE FUTURE
SUMMARY: Joe Petyan, Executive Partner at J. Walter Thompson, sees a bright future for the creative industries in the UK as long as human creativity is harnessed and celebrated.
I really do think the future for creative industry is, it’s got to be bright. It is going to be bright. The reason I think most of all is, is because there is still-, I’ve been in this industry a while, and what was true I first started is still true now. Machines can’t do what we do. Technology can be creative technology, we talk increasingly about creative technologies, but machines can’t yet do what people do. Creativity is inherently human. It’s inherently different and odd, and challenging, and conflicting, and intention laden, and hard to get right. Machines can’t do that and so I’m enormously positive still in my outlook because it’s the one thing we can do as humans that is brilliant, and it’s so pertinent to us as humankind. As long as machines can’t do it as well as humans can then it’s bright, our future.